Kaia Sand

Kaia Sand is the author of Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010), a book that is also a walk Sand leads in North Portland investigating political history and current goings-on. She is the author of the poetry collection interval (Edge Books 2004) and coauthor, with Jules Boykoff, of Landscapes of Dissent (Palm Press 2008). She recently embroidered an eight-foot dropcloth poem, which is represented as a broadside for this year’s Dusie Kollektiv. Sand curates Econ Salons, a format blending economic talks with cultural performances. She recently created the Happy Valley Project, an investigation of housing foreclosures and financial speculation that included a magic show, A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money That Lost Its Puff.

'Go On' by Ethel Rackin

Jueds: “[T]he emptiness you seek also takes time,”[1] the speaker of Ethel Rackin’s strange, magical, and luminous second book tells us at the end of the title poem. The poems in Go On are mostly small — the briefest a single line — and yet they do take time, deep, mysterious, and wide-ranging as they are, to truly enter: they are enormous within their brevity. And, following from Rackin’s Buddhist sensibility, the poems do seek some sort of “emptiness,” which could also be defined as spirit or holiness or divinity. Rooted in the tactile and quotidian, they leap from their contemplation of birds, trees, and tract houses to the deep interior world of the speaker which, at the same time, reaches through and beyond to an enormous otherness.

Jueds: “[T]he emptiness you seek also takes time,”[1] the speaker of Ethel Rackin’s strange, magical, and luminous second book tells us at the end of the title poem. The poems in Go On are mostly small — the briefest a single line — and yet they do take time, deep, mysterious, and wide-ranging as they are, to truly enter: they are enormous within their brevity. And, following from Rackin’s Buddhist sensibility, the poems do seek some sort of “emptiness,” which could also be defined as spirit or holiness or divinity.